Risk

The Policy Implications of Risk Compensation and Plural Rationalities

John Adams | 1995

Quote from prologue: “This book began as a collaborative venture with Michael Thompson. For over 15 years my research into risk, mainly on the road, was focused on the theory of “risk compensation”. This theory accords primacy in the explanation of accidents to the human propensity to take risks. The theory postulates that we all come equipped with “risk thermostats” and suggests that safety interventions that do not affect the setting of the thermostat are likely to be frustrated by behavioural responses that reassert the level of risk with which people were originally content. My research had noted that there were large variations in the settings of individual thermostats, but had little to say about why this should be so.

About ten years ago I read Michael’s article “Aesthetics of risk” (Thompson 1980), and about five years later met the man himself. His research into risk over the past 20 years has been central to the development of a perspective that has come to be known as “cultural theory” (Thompson et al. 1990). Risk, according to this perspective, is culturally constructed; where scientific fact falls short of certainty we are guided by assumption, inference and belief. In such circumstances the deterministic rationality of classical physics is replaced by a set of conditional, probabilistic rationalities.

Risk throws up questions to which there can be no verifiable single right answers derivable by means of a unique rationality. Cultural theory illuminates a world of plural rationalities; it discerns order and pattern in risk-taking behaviour, and the beliefs that underpin it. Wherever debates about risk are prolonged and unresolved—as, for example, that between environmentalists and the nuclear industry—cultural theory seeks an explanation not in further scientific analysis but in the differences in premises from which the participants are arguing. Michael thought that risk compensation was obvious common sense, and I thought that cultural theory would cast helpful light on how the thermostat was set.

This book grew out of a joint research project called “Risk and rationality” that we undertook for the Economic and Social Research Council. It draws upon much of our earlier work, and makes connections that had earlier eluded us. When we first discussed the idea of a book with Roger Jones of UCL Press we rashly promised to produce “the complete theory of risk”. Trying has been an educational experience, but the complete theory of risk now seems to me as likely as the complete theory of happiness.

The writing did not go as planned—but then this is a book about risk. Michael, who is self-employed, was distracted by consultancy offers from all around the world that he could not refuse. I stayed at home and got on with the writing, making use of Michael, when I could catch him, as a consultant. Inevitably the book does not have the balance originally intended between his perspective and mine. In Chapter 11 I refer to the “tension” between cultural theory and risk compensation. This refers to my unresolved difficulty in reconciling cultural theory with the reflexivity of risk. The world and our perceptions of it are constantly being transformed by our effect on the world, and its effect on us. My perceptions of risk have been altered by the process of writing this book. I now see the stereotypes of cultural theory— egalitarians, individualists, hierarchists, fatalists and hermits—everywhere I look. But which am I?

I think I can see elements of all these stereotypes in my own make up. Am I more sophisticated and complex than all the other risk-takers in the world? I doubt it. In applying these stereotypes to others I am reducing their complex uniqueness to something that I can (mis)understand. In its raw state the reflexive fluidity of the world overwhelms our limited powers of comprehension. We resort to simplification and abstraction in an attempt to cope. Cultural theory postulates a high degree of pattern and consistency in the midst of all the reflexive fluidity. The insistence in cultural theory (Thompson, 1990) on the impossibility of more than five “viable ways of life” I find unproven and unprovable, but I still find the theory useful. For me, limiting the number of risk-taking types to five is defensible, not just by theoretical speculation, but by virtue of five being a small and comprehensible number; theories of behaviour, to be useful and widely communicable, must be simple. Risk compensation and cultural theory provide a life-raft that saves one from drowning in the sea of reflexive relativism; they are two sets of simplifying assumptions deployed in this book in an attempt to make sense of behaviour in the face of uncertainty. They are not the complete theory of risk.

In “test marketing” draft chapters of the book on a variety of people with an interest in risk, it became apparent that many from the scientific and managerial side of the subject are unaware of the anthropological literature on risk, and its roots in the work of Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Malinowksi, Parsons and other old masters of sociology and anthropology; they have reacted with scepticism and impatience to the theorizing of Douglas, Wildavsky, Thompson and other, more recent, workers in this tradition. On the other hand, some in this tradition have complained that my treatment of cultural theory is “superficial and derivative”—to quote from the comments of one referee on a part of

Chapter 3 which was submitted to an academic journal as an article. The literature on risk, measured by pages published, is over-whelmingly dominated by the scientific/managerial perspective. In trying to make cultural theory accessible to the scientist-managers, I have stripped it of most of its historical baggage, and many of its claims to “scientific” authority. I have retained what I consider to be its easily communicated essence; I have treated it as a set of abstractions that help to make sense of many inter-minable debates about risk. I have no illusions that my efforts to bridge the divide between the “hard” and “soft” approaches to risk will satisfy everyone—indeed cultural theory warns that everyone will never agree about risk. But attempting the impossible has been fun.

John Adams, London.”

Bibliography

Adams, J. (1995). The Policy Implications of Risk Compensation and Plural Rationalities. Routledge.

Thompson, M. (1980). The aesthetics of risk: culture or conflict. In Societal risk assessment: how safe is safe enough?, R.C.Schwing & W.A.Albers (eds), 273–85. Plenum.

Thompson, Ellis, M.,& Wildavsky, A. (1990). Cultural theory. Westview. Treasury 1991. Economic appraisal in central government: a technical guide for government departments. HMSO.

Download Risk.

Visit website John Adams.